Later, she thought about it countless times: if she had brought her phone into the conference room that day, her mom probably wouldn't have shown up outside the office with thirty egg pancakes in tow.
She replayed that thought over and over afterward, so many times she'd lost count. Every time, she couldn't help cursing herself for not being more careful that day.
But Yin Che never allowed phones on the table during meetings. Zhou Yuwei had left hers at her desk, screen facing up, sitting there quietly. No one had paid it any attention.
At nine thirty that morning, the project's midterm review proceeded as usual in the small conference room on the third floor.
Two planners from the same team sat on opposite sides of the long table, both looking down as they wrote in their own notebooks. The projector's white light shone against the wall, while the fan hummed softly, stirring the air until the entire room felt a little dry.
The clock on the wall read 9:31. The second hand moved so quietly it was almost impossible to hear.
Zhou Yuwei had left her phone at her desk and walked in with her laptop. The only thing on the table was a cup of plain water. She had even skipped her usual coffee for staying awake. She'd worked until nearly one in the morning, and sleeping an extra ten minutes had felt like a luxury.
She projected the presentation onto the screen and flipped through the outdoor pop-up event's traffic-flow map, materials list, and budget sheet, one page at a time. She kept her voice steadier than usual. She had checked this thing at least three times, and every number had gone through her head more than once.
Yin Che sat across from her, flipping rapidly through the stack of printed pages in her hands. Only after tapping the edge of a page twice with her pencil did she speak.
“Why does the route start at the east entrance?”
“Because the east side is closer to the metro exit, and the foot traffic is thirty percent higher than on the west side. We calculated it using the number of entries during peak hours.”
Her answer came quickly. The numbers she'd memorized the night before slipped right off her tongue, and even she thought it had sounded pretty good.
Yin Che turned to the next page and tapped the booth layout with one finger.
“Is a one-point-two-meter gap between booths enough?”
“The required clear width for wheelchair access is ninety centimeters. We left room for a buffer, so one-point-two meters is the minimum.”
Yin Che gave a slight nod without replying and quietly turned to the next page.
A little tension slipped out of Zhou Yuwei's shoulders. She felt like she'd made it through this round more smoothly than expected. Her fingertip glided across the trackpad as she prepared to continue, while she mentally pulled out Ke Minghan's comment from last time—that she was too young—and refuted it all over again. She'd prepared thoroughly enough this time. No one should be able to find fault with it.
But Yin Che didn't let her turn the page. Her gaze settled on the site layout displayed on the screen, her voice as even as before, without a single word emphasized.
“What happens if it rains?”
Zhou Yuwei's hand stopped on the trackpad. The question slammed the brakes on her entire brain.
She rapidly flipped through every page of the presentation in her mind: the traffic-flow map, booth layout, sponsor wall, photo check-in spot, giveaway area. The pages flashed past, but she couldn't find a single one that mentioned a contingency plan for rain.
She opened her mouth, wanting to say something—anything—to buy herself time, but even that sentence jammed in her throat.
Only then did she realize that she hadn't seriously considered it at all. The event venue was one huge open-air plaza, and she hadn't even included a quote for tents in the budget. Not one of the numbers she'd stayed up late checking had mentioned rain.
Several thoughts flashed through her mind. Should she make something up about the weather forecast calling for clear skies? The idea hadn't even fully formed before she rejected it. Making things up in a situation like this would only make her look worse.
The two coworkers across the table had both stopped writing. They waited silently for her answer, and that silence made it harder to breathe than any prompting could have.
The projector fan suddenly sounded much louder—so loud she could hear her heartbeat racing it for the same beat.
“I...” she began. Her voice hung in the air before she barely managed to continue. “I'll go back and add a version for this.”
The conference room fell silent for two seconds. Ke Minghan wasn't there to sit in on the meeting today, but those two seconds felt even worse than being stabbed by one of his follow-up remarks.
She lowered her head and stared at her laptop screen, her knuckles pressing against the edge of the trackpad until they turned white. A sheen of sweat had already seeped across the back of her neck, cooling little by little against her shirt collar. Across from her, the other two coworkers' pens scratched over paper. She could guess exactly what they were writing.
She waited for Yin Che to ask another question or throw out an even harsher assessment. Instead, Yin Che wrote a single line in the margin of the proposal and turned the page.
“Add it.”
Two words, delivered as evenly as when Zhou Yuwei had answered about the route from the east entrance. There was no emotion to read in them, yet they told her more clearly than any reprimand could have: she had genuinely failed to answer this question.
Zhou Yuwei lowered her head and wrote the words in her notebook. The tip of her pen punched through the paper, leaving a tiny hole. Only then did she realize how unnaturally hard she was gripping it. She quickly loosened her hold and continued listening to the next item on the agenda, but half her attention was still stuck on that question: What happens if it rains?
After the meeting, she packed up her laptop and walked back to her desk. Her mind was still turning over how to fill in the rain contingency plan and which vendor to ask for a quote on waterproof canopies. She didn't even feel her knee smack against the edge of the divider.
As she passed the break room, the machine was making a latte. Steam hissed loudly, but she didn't even glance over.
People on both sides of the aisle were on the phone or chewing on bread. The ordinary sounds of the office blended together, yet she felt those two words—add it—circling in her ears again and again. They unsettled her more than any time a client had nitpicked her work. After all, clients asked what was wrong with something someone else had made. This time, the question had exposed an entire section she'd left out herself.
Her phone lay beside her keyboard, the screen still lit. Three notifications were stacked on top of one another, all from the same name: Mom.
She picked up the phone. There were three missed calls, at 9:12, 9:21, and 9:37, all during the stretch of time she'd been trapped in the conference room, unable to answer the question about the rain contingency plan.
Her mom rarely called three times in a row. Usually, if Zhou Yuwei didn't answer once, she would send a message telling her to call back. This time, there wasn't a single message—not even the stickers she normally used. There were only three clean, silent missed calls, which was strange enough to make her uneasy.
Her heart gave a sudden lurch. Before she could figure out what was going on, her finger had already pressed Call Back.
She held the phone to her ear. One ring, two, three. The ringing went on longer than usual. She stared at the old calendar hanging on the divider, which should have been torn down ages ago, her fingernail unconsciously scraping at the edge of her phone.
After the fourth ring, no one answered. The call switched to a familiar prerecorded female voice, then beeped and prompted her to leave a message.
Zhou Yuwei froze with the phone against her mouth for half a second. She looked around. No one was at the neighboring workstation, so she lowered her voice and spoke into the phone.
“Mom, don't come. It's really not convenient for you to come here. I'll go home this weekend.”
Even she froze after saying it. The words had come out more forcefully than she'd expected, as if everything she'd been holding in for days had spilled out all at once.
She held the phone and listened to the silence before the recording ended, then slowly lowered it from her ear. The screen showed that the call had ended: one minute and nine seconds.
She stared at the red redial button on the screen. Once things settled down, she'd call again and ask whether something had happened today. Why had her mom called three times in a row? It wasn't like her at all.
The last time her mom had called repeatedly like this was when the griddle at home broke. Maybe another appliance had malfunctioned this time. The thought went around once in her head without arriving at an answer.
She lit up her phone screen, then turned it off again, hesitating over whether to call back immediately. In the end, she decided to deal with the work in front of her first.
Just then, Lin Xiaoyu poked half her head over the divider.
“Yuen, did you send out the notice about rescheduling the pop-up event? Marketing is asking for it.”
“Give me a second.”
Zhou Yuwei answered without looking up, her fingers still resting on the screen.
Almost at the exact same moment, Yin Che sent the supplemental files to the department group chat. The notification chime overlapped with Lin Xiaoyu's question.
Zhou Yuwei's attention was pulled toward the attachment that popped up. She opened the file to check the page numbers, then casually flipped her phone facedown on the desk. It landed with a dull thud.
While explaining to Lin Xiaoyu who needed to receive the rescheduling notice, she lowered her head to check the list of supplemental materials Yin Che had sent. Her fingers flew across the keyboard. The second call she hadn't made yet was buried beneath the screen and never came back to mind.
The rest of the afternoon was perfectly ordinary.
She pulled up the rain contingency plan again and filled it in item by item: quotes for backup canopies, alternative routes, waterproofing for the sponsor wall. She made two calls to vendors to confirm the canopy dimensions and ended up making the plan more detailed than the original, even marking which entrances would need extra nonslip mats on rainy days.
At one point, a vendor gave her a bizarre number for the quote. It took three rounds of back-and-forth before she figured out that they'd calculated using the wrong unit. She added a note beside the quote to remind herself to check the units first next time she received one.
The person on the phone sounded impatient, but she didn't take it personally. After hanging up, she continued filling in the next item.
By the time she'd been staring at the screen for hours, even lunch had been something Lin Xiaoyu picked up and set on the corner of her desk. Zhou Yuwei hadn't taken a single bite before going back to work, and eventually she couldn't even remember whether she'd eaten lunch.
The lid of the lunch box remained unopened. A thin layer of condensation clung to the plastic bag.
Lin Xiaoyu was organizing the day's administrative forms beside her. She looked up and glanced at the iced Americano on the corner of the desk. The ice had melted until only a thin layer remained stuck to the bottom. The drink had faded from dark coffee to a murky yellow-brown. The straw hadn't moved once, and the beads of water on the cup had dried into a ring.
She had bought it herself that morning, planning to use it for a boost before the midterm review. Then she'd been busy all the way until now without even touching the straw.
Lin Xiaoyu opened her mouth, looked at the drink, then at Zhou Yuwei's profile as she stared intently at the screen. In the end, she said nothing and lowered her head to continue organizing her forms.
A little after four in the afternoon, Yin Che passed by her desk. She didn't stop, and her gaze rested on the screen for less than two seconds.
“Make this font one size smaller.”
By the time she finished speaking, she was already walking away. She didn't even turn around to check whether Zhou Yuwei had heard.
Zhou Yuwei immediately changed the font from twelve-point to ten-point. She watched the entire layout pull itself together. The formerly loose columns snapped neatly into place, and it really did look much better.
She stared at the screen for two seconds, her fingertip still resting on the mouse. The thought Why does she get it right every single time? hadn't finished sinking in. She was wondering whether she should simply record the font sizes they used most often and save herself the revision next time when her phone vibrated once, then again.
She flipped the phone over. A department group-chat notification appeared on the screen, sent by Ke Minghan. Attached was a screenshot of a competition website's winners list. One line had been circled in red, the color glaringly different from an ordinary notification.
@Zhou Yuen Please explain the originality of this portfolio at tomorrow morning's meeting.
She stared at the line for several seconds, her fingertip hovering above the screen without moving.
The profile pictures of the group members lit up one by one with read indicators. Eleven people. All online. Not one of them said anything, but every one of them had seen it.
She locked and unlocked her phone, reading the line again to make sure she hadn't misread it. Only then did she realize she'd forgotten even to breathe quietly. Her palms began to sweat again.